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The Olympic Curse

ISTANBUL — I arrived in Istanbul in mid-May, planning to stay for a few weeks and take advantage of the distance to write about Rio de Janeiro, where I live.

From my studio apartment downhill from Taksim Square, I could see the minarets of the old city and the ferries plying the Bosporus. Some of the ships bore red banners that said, Istanbul 2020: Bridge Together. The city is campaigning to host the summer Olympics that year.

This caught my eye. Rio is preparing for the 2016 Games, and before I left the city those five colored rings were already visible everywhere. And already, delicate questions have surfaced about many of the construction projects that will be undertaken in preparation for the Olympics, as well as for the 2014 World Cup. There’s the refurbishing of the Maracana stadium, which is grossly over-budget. And there’s a court case over a shady privatization scheme that would hand Brazil’s best-loved soccer pitch over to a private consortium — the same consortium that conducted the project’s feasibility study.

Both Turkey and Brazil are maturing democracies and emerging markets that have made great strides toward political and financial stability over the past decade, after years of lurching from crisis to crisis. It was largely to ratify this progress that Brazil bid to host the sporting events. Now Turkey wants to do the same. Seeing the Istanbul 2020 ads, I wondered idly if Turks understood the costs — financial, social and political — of hosting major sporting events.

A young architect showed me around Istanbul on May 24. In Taksim Square, a congested transport hub smelling of diesel exhaust and roasting kebabs, he mentioned in passing that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was pushing ahead with plans to remove a cluster of sycamores and build a mosque and a mall in their place. An environmental group was trying to protect the trees from being torn out.

The next time I saw Taksim, it was behind barricades; flags draped over the square’s central monument, a statue of the revered founder of the secular Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, called on Erdogan to renounce his post. Residual tear gas sprayed still pricked the eyes; the police had moved in just hours before, using water cannons and pepper spray against the demonstrators in the park.

During the days that followed, as the protests and the police crackdowns intensified, the demonstrators I talked to said they saw reflected in the repression their government’s increasingly autocratic ways. They cited its meddling in their personal choices, controversial development projects like the destruction of a historic Roma community and of the low-income Tarlabasi district. Even as police and protesters clashed in bloody confrontations, Erdogan repeated that “a mosque will be built in Taksim” — adding that he didn’t need permission for the project from “a few marauders.”

I told Turks that a protest movement of this size would never happen in Brazil. Suddenly, it did. Those demonstrations, too, erupted over an apparently minor issue: an increase in bus fares. And now they have also grown into demands that the government be more responsive to their needs for decent transportation, health care and education. Marchers have denounced the use of public funds for white elephant projects, like a high-tech 43,000-seat stadium in the Amazon city of Manaus, whose 4th division soccer team attracts fewer than 600 fans per game. Brazilians want quality hospitals and schools instead.

Preparations for the World Cup and the Olympics have only made matters worse. The authorities in Rio have invoked the sporting events to push through major redevelopment projects over many people’s legal concerns and rights.

The plan to turn the Maracana stadium and the area around it into a shopping and entertainment hub has turned particularly ugly. The city’s housing department started razing favelas before residents had somewhere else to go. The redevelopment plan also calls for the destruction of a former Indian Museum next to the stadium that has been occupied for over a decade by various indigenous peoples. Sergio Cabral, the state’s governor said in October that the building would be destroyed, even before the city authorities had obtained a court order allowing it. “Long live democracy,” he said sarcastically. “We’re going to tear it down.” In January, riot police surrounded it and threatened residents, still without a court order. In March the unarmed residents were forced out with pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets.

With similar disregard for popular concerns, Erdogan and his government are pushing through controversial mega-projects in Istanbul, including plans for another airport, a third bridge over the Bosporus and a new canal connecting the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. And that’s without the excuse of hosting the Olympics. Imagine with it.